


before the journey

by alternatedoom



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Crying, Gen, Injury, Short, Wolfheart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 12:12:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7639726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alternatedoom/pseuds/alternatedoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anduin, alone and miserable, the night before he leaves Darnassus with Velen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	before the journey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mezduin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mezduin/gifts).



> Prompt from many-anduin-wrynns tumblr: _I really wanna know how much Anduin cried after he left the summit in Wolfheart_  
>  _I just have this very strong feeling that he kept it together until he was given his own quarters that night and then he cried REAL LOUD into his pillows bc honestly_  
>  _How Varian is acting? Having to leave home for Light knows how long? Varian crushing his arm? Feeling scared to hug his own dad?_  
>  _Yeah… I’d cry, too. A lot._  
>  _No matter how resolved he feels in his path at that moment or how strongly he knows he’s making the right decision, you know he’s so torn up inside_  
>  _Tbh I wish the books covered more moments like that for Anduin. The ones where his quiet strength crumbles._  
>  _SOMEONE WRITE THIS FOR ME_
> 
> I loved this prompt.

He's fearful for a few moments as they stand up in the Temple Gardens, afraid Velen will send him back to his original bedchamber for the night. His guest room is ensconced deep within the wing set aside for the honored personages from Stormwind, for his protection just like everything else in his life.

Thankfully, Velen starts in the opposite direction, bringing him to a new room in another area of Darnassus. Velen bids him goodnight and leaves.

Anduin sits on the bed and waits to undress until a guard brings him his clothes. He's grateful they do so in short order, and appreciative again to see someone placed his things in two cloth bags with shoulder straps rather than dragging over his single but heavy and unwieldy trunk. Someone was thinking of him, at least. 

He doubts it was his father.

Trembling, he disrobes.

He dons his nightshirt, pulls back the blankets, and lies down on the firm, unfamiliar mattress.

And then, only seconds later, the tears begin.

He feels them welling up from deep beneath his eyes. At first he tries to hold them back, keep the emotion within him buried, but after a few seconds he can't force down the rawness any longer. He's always been a sensitive boy, always felt life's sorrows and the plights of others too deeply for his own good. He cries more easily than he'd like, but in his waking hours he's learned to maintain a carefully constructed mask, a calm and diplomatic front to conceal his emotions and show only what he means to show.

Now that he doesn't have any appearances to perpetuate, his body overrules the will of his mind, and his tight self-control drowns in a flood of hot, angry, grief-stricken tears. He cries for himself now, noisily, hard and long, cries as he hasn't since the news about Bolvar, and before that, when his father vanished without a trace.

He hasn't even finished grieving the only person who loved him without feeling compelled to smother him in the trappings of safety, lest he skin a knee or have a moment's conversation away from guards.

But now, now he has no guards. Now he's alone.

The sobs wrack his shoulders, and he muffles the sound with his pillow as best he can; he doesn't know who has rooms next to his or how thick the walls are. If he's overheard, all his iron self-control will be for nothing.

His father loves him, of that he has no doubt, but his father's smoldering violence has become a frightening, uncontrolled force, a magical flint and pyrite that goes up in a blaze at the slightest provocation. His father is cruel, he would condemn all the citizens of Gilneas for ego and punishment. His father is spiteful, and vengeful, and a drunkard, and sometimes unrecognizable to Anduin since he was split in half and then reunited into a single troubled man. Someone Anduin can't trust. Someone who won't listen to him. Not only can he not trust his father with his love, with his thoughts, with the new and tender truth about who he is (no nascent warrior, but a priest in the making), for all that his father's obsessed with keeping him safe, he can't even rely upon his father not to physically hurt him.

The ache of his loneliness throbs a thousand times worse than the pain of his father clamping the full strength of one powerful hand around his narrow forearm.

His sobs subside temporarily into quiet weeping, a lull in the storm. His father has the right to parent him the way he wishes. And as king, no parent has more rights than his father. He's grateful his father let him go. He could have effectively been made a prisoner--though not, he thinks bitterly, much more than he already was. Anduin's glad he spoke to his father face to face rather than finishing the letter he'd begun; if his father had been handed a communique and read his message in written form, he'd probably have hastened to the Exodar to take Anduin home. Better to have the confrontation over and done with, however dismayingly the situation unfolded.

He can't speak of this pain to anyone, not now that Bolvar's gone. Earlier in the evening, in the heat of his anger and frustration he'd told Velen about his father holding him back, keeping him caged and leashed like a treasured pet, but Anduin hadn't belabored the point, and Velen gently made it clear he couldn't speak or act against his liege lord.

He wonders if Velen understands who inflicted his injury.

Probably, he decides. Of course, Velen must. But perhaps Velen saw in his mind the injury had been--had been an accident. Anduin hadn't spoken of its infliction, of course. He wouldn't bring shame upon his father or the family name by airing their dirty laundry in public, or even in private for that matter. Bolvar taught him better than that. A lesson Onyxia impressed upon him also, but naturally she'd wanted him to bring his problems to her, to be his counselor as surely as though she was his confessor in the Holy Church.

Anduin curls up on the bed, turning his face on the wet pillow and pulling his legs up into a fetal position. The worst part wasn't the sharp pain but rather the immediate regret, the horror, the clear anguish in his father's eyes after he realized what he was doing. And when his father had gone to embrace him afterwards, he'd instinctively flinched away, and after half a second's thought, he hadn't let his father hug him goodbye. The discomfort in his arm has been gone a good half hour or so, but Anduin cradles the limb against his chest as he cries, hiccuping for breath.

He's journeyed away from home before, of course, many times, but never to a foreign place he's not been to prior alongside his father. He's never traveled somewhere alone, without at least Wyll at his back, and he doesn't know when he'll go home again. He trusts Velen completely, but he barely knows the Prophet. A fresh spate of intense sobs takes him, and the tears pour again from his eyes in a flood of self-pity, of shame, of fear, of longing, for his father and for Bolvar. He's too old to cry in anyone's arms, but if he had Bolvar back for even a few moments, he would fling himself into Bolvar's embrace, seeking the comfort and reassurance he knows he would find there.

Bolvar would be proud of him, proud of him for seeking his own path and his independence and proud of him for holding himself together until he had solitude in which to break down. Tearfully Anduin hangs onto that thought like the lifesaving rope it is. Bolvar would be proud of him.

He wants to study under Velen, he wants to go to the Exodar, he does, he knows this is the right choice. He will be a student of the Light. And if the Exodar will be alien and unknown, full of strangers, well. At least those strangers won't have faces as familiar as the back of his own hand.

He's exhausted, and as he lies on the bed he passes beyond thought into that place where he can only _feel_ , and mindlessly he cries for a little while longer before he closes his eyes.


End file.
